Quantification and Reduction of Visual Load during BCI Operation

Operating a brain-actuated vehicle in real world environment requires much of our visual attention. However, a typical brain-computer interface (BCI) sends the feedback information about the current status of the user’s brain via also the visual channel. As a result, users have to split their visual attention into two; one for the surroundings and another for the visual BCI feedback. Multiple object tracking experiment is employed to quantify the visual load added by the visual feedback. We show that the additional visual load is almost eliminated, and the true negative rate of a BCI operation (intentional non-control) is improved when the visual feedback is replaced by the tactile feedback.

Presented at:

IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, San Diego, CA, USA, October 5-8, 2014